My last review was of the new picture, Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, which
stars Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame, the sultry, Academy Award-winning screen
star of the late 1940s and 1950s. [Here’s a link to that review] I
suspect that many of you who have seen that film, and in fact anyone who enjoys
older movies and/or great acting, might be interested in exploring some of
Grahame’s cinema work, so what follows are brief reviews of four of her best.
Before getting started, however, for those who haven’t read my
previous post, I’ll reiterate my brief bio of Gloria Grahame:
As a character in Film
Stars put it, Grahame was “a big
name in black and white films” but didn’t do so well in color. During her best
years, which stretched from the late 1940s well into the 1950s, she was a
household name – nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Crossfire,
as a bargirl peripherally caught up in a murder investigation; then winning the
award for playing Dick Powell’s vivacious Southern belle wife in The
Bad and the Beautiful. She held
her own opposite Humphrey Bogart in the great noir classic In a Lonely Place and was
the tough moll to Richard Widmark’s psychopathic hood in The Big Heat (1953). Others
may remember her as Ado Annie Carnes, the girl who “caint say no” in the film
adaptation of Oklahoma (1955),
although that was far from the typical Grahame movie.
By the late 1950s, however, her star began to dim. Her
maverick reputation; some scandals fueled by her libidinous spirit; and age
(she turned 37 in 1960, ancient by Hollywood’s standards – still a big problem
for actresses today, but even more so back then) all contributed. But she kept
on acting – mostly in live theater and increasingly in less than marquee
venues. Sometimes she’d get occasional bit parts in movies or TV, too. Yet, as
shown in Film Stars Don’t Die in
Liverpool, Grahame’s spirit never waned. She died in 1981 at age 57.
In all the pictures in which I’ve seen her, Grahame brings
real commitment and an ephemeral star quality to her roles. However small the
part – for her Oscar winning role in The Bad and the Beautiful, she was
on screen for less than ten minutes, tops – she always seems alive, and her
performance is invariably memorable.
Bogie plays a screenwriter with the cool name of Dixon
Steele. Steele was once thought to be brilliant but is now generally considered
washed up, due in part to his reputation as a difficult son-of-a-bitch to work
with. Today we’d say he has anger management problems. He also seems to be
drinking a lot, but everybody did that back in the day as the movies would have
it. [And there’s another character in the film, the aging, downtrodden
tragedian Charlie Waterman (charmingly played by Robert Warwick) who is a
clearly defined alcoholic, so probably not Dixon Steele.]
Anyway, Steele invites a hat check girl to his apartment one
evening to tell him the plot of a trashy best-selling novel that he’s just been
asked to turn into a screenplay. He considers it a waste of his precious time
to read the book himself. Later, after she leaves, the hatcheck girl turns up
dead, and Bogie – the last person to see her alive, is a prime suspect. His
tendency to play the wise guy when questioned by the police doesn’t help him
much, but his new neighbor, Laurel Gray – played by Grahame – comes forward to
corroborate his story. Pretty soon Bogie and the neighbor are falling in love, even
as police suspicion of him grows.
It’s pretty neat to see Bogie falling in love. We’ve seen it
before, in To Have and Have Not
(1944) for example and in brief flashbacks in Casablanca as well, but it is a more domesticated, goofy-grin
kind-of swoon that he does here in In a Lonely Place. Given the fresh, forthright,
independent spirit of this Miss Gray, not to mention her comeliness, it’s not
hard to understand. But there’s also a creepy side to Steele. Before long even we begin to wonder a bit about his
story, as does Miss Grey, after she witnesses a couple of his rages.
So we’ve got a sweet, then scary love story plus a murder
mystery, and some pretty great performances along the way to thrilling
climax!
This is one of the few A-list movies in which Gloria Grahame
plays a leading, rather than a supporting role. Rather than playing a femme
fatale or the whore with a heart of gold, she’s more of a hard-luck yet
wholesome young woman, almost literally the girl-next-door, and someone we
readily can relate to. As I’ve suggested, she is pretty awesome.
As an aside: Some of
those who knew Bogart well, said his character in this picture was probably the
closest to the Bogie they knew than any of his other roles. And respecting
Gloria, she just happened to be married to the film’s director, Nick Ray, at
the time, although the marriage was on the rocks by the time production got
underway. The thing with Ray’s son, referenced by Grahame’s sister in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,
undoubtedly played a part. The producers, concerned about marital discord on
the set, insisted that her contract contain stipulations saying stuff like "my husband [Ray]
shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my
actions during the hours from 9 AM to 6 PM, every day except Sunday.” It also said that she could not “nag, cajole, tease or in any
other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.” Imagine some lawyer
trying to insert such language in an employment contract today!
If you like classic films, In A
Lonely Place is a great one. It’s
available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes and other streaming services
and on DVD from Netflix.
***
Another terrific movie featuring
Gloria Grahame is The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). This is the picture for
which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress, but it was
choc-a-block with better known stars – chief among them being Kirk Douglas and
Lana Turner, followed by Dick Powell; as well as a few names some older folks
might recall, like Walter Pigeon, as well as Leo G Carroll and Gilbert Roland. Helmed
by big-time director Vincent Minelli - remembered for such other classics
as An
American In Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958),
it was written by Charles Schnee (who also wrote Red River (1948), the great John Wayne - Montgomery Clift vehicle
and Butterfield 8 (1960), which won
Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar in 1961). The Bad and the Beautiful itself was
nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won 5, including Gloria’s.
The
story concerns an ambitious Hollywood movie producer and director named
Jonathan Shields, played by Kirk Douglas. Jonathan is talented, charming … and
completely ruthless. Told in flashback
form, the film traces this guy’s rise and fall as seen through the eyes of people
he has worked with, then stepped on in his climb to the top. The frame of the
story is that he is now a Hollywood outcast and is asking each of these folks,
all of whom have sworn never to work with him again, to help him make his
comeback picture. They include his one-time best friend, a director (played by
Barry Sullivan); a screen siren that he discovered and made a star (Lana
Turner); and a writer and former academic that he lures to Hollywood (played by
Dick Powell). Walter Pigeon as his sort-of consigliere
is there at the end to remind each of them why they may, in fact, owe him this favor.
Grahame,
as the writer’s wife – a spirited but naive, Southern belle who gets caught up
in Kirk Douglas’s schemes – steals (in a good way) every scene she’s in, which
is why the gold statuette. Actually, she
can’t steal the scenes she’s in with Kirk Douglas, but she holds her own. And if you haven’t ever seen Kirk Douglas
(father of Michael) in his prime [Ace in
The Hole (1951), Spartacus
(1960), Lonely Are The Brave (1962)], well
– you should. He is a great, great actor. This is a good place to start: he is in
full, fabulous flower in The Bad and the Beautiful.
I myself
had never seen this picture until a few weeks ago, after seeing Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. What a pleasant surprise! A movie that
not only holds up well more than sixty-five years after its release, The
Bad and the Beautiful has a special resonance in these days of
heightened awareness of sexual manipulation and harassment.
The Bad
and the Beautiful is available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes and
other streaming services but, unfortunately not from Netflix.
***
Grahame has yet another
great supporting role in the noir classic, The Big Heat (1953). Not to be
confused with The Big Sleep (1946), the
Howard Hawks movie starring Bogart and Bacall,
The Big Heat is directed by none other than Fritz Lang, master
of dark cinema with classics like Metropolis
(1927), M (1931), and Scarlet Street (1945). It’s the story of
an honest cop in a corrupt city.
Det. Sgt. Dave
Bannion is obsessed with bringing down the crime syndicate that runs thingsin
his town including, he believes, the mayor and his police chief. Bannion is
played by an intense Glenn Ford [Gilda (1946), 3:10 to Yuma (1957)] as a man
driven not only for justice but for revenge.
Bannion is up against
some formidable opponents, including the syndicate’s wealthy, suavely amoral
boss, Lagana (Alexander Scourby, using his famously sonorous voice to great
effect here), but best personified by Lagana’s hot-tempered, vicious lieutenant
Vince Stone played by then relatively unknown Lee Marvin [Cat Ballou (1965), The Dirty
Dozen (1967)]. Grahame plays Debby Marsh, Stone’s girlfriend of the moment,
in it for the excitement and the “expensive fun”, as she calls it. Given some
of the best lines in the picture, Debby is a wisecracking, cynical yet
appealing moll. Even the grim Bannion starts to fall for her. When Stone turns
on her – in the infamous, still shocking coffeepot scene – the plot turns too,
leading to a thrilling, rather surprising ending.
All told, The
Big Heat is a fun movie to watch, and not just for fans of film-noir.
It’s available for streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and
other services, as well as on DVD from Netflix.
***
The fourth and last Gloria
Grahame picture I’d like to suggest to you is called Crossfire, released in 1947. A post war movie about some GIs who
get caught up in a murder, it’s another noir-ish whodunit. Unlike the other movies discussed above, Crossfire seems more like a B-picture than
a prime-time feature (as do many noir films), but it offers several up and
coming male stars of the time: Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Robert Young,
all of whom acquit themselves pretty well.
“Hate is like a
loaded gun”, proclaimed the movie’s poster, and the not so subtle subtext of
the story is the evil of prejudice and, more specifically in this case,
anti-semitism. Still, it’s not quite as preachy as Gentleman’s Agreement the Gregory Peck film which came out a few
months later.
Crossfire
is not a brilliant film, but Grahame, playing a bargirl who becomes a reluctant
alibi witness for one of the soldiers, is just great: cynical, sassy,
suspicious of the authorities – really, in her limited role, the highlight of
the picture. Here again, she illustrates the adage that there is no such thing as a small part. As I mentioned earlier,
this is the film for which she won her first academy award nomination. My
advice: check out the first three pictures I’ve reviewed above first. If, like
me, you still have the Grahame bug, check out this one next.
Crossfire
can be found on Amazon, Vudu, iTunes
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